programming

Kushal Das thinks he knows what you're doing this summer: joining him and his team of volunteers in free, online programming classes, where you'll learn more than just how to code. In Kushal's hands, you'll also receive a crash course in the open source way.

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Thanks to alumni and faculty of West Virginia University's Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, students with an interest in software development will now be able to fund their education through an Open Source Scholarship.

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In 1987, Apple created a program called HyperCard. If you haven’t heard of it, all you need to know is that tens of millions of end user programmers adopted it. HyperCard was the easiest and most popular end user programming environment ever created.

LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create simple one-off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems. As a production-quality, natural language hypermedia environment, LiveCode runs on all major operating systems (Linux, Mac, and Windows) and can generate code for all major desktop platforms, as well as all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS). They even got it up and running on the Raspberry Pi recently. 

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Computer programming can be a fun hobby, as I learned when I programmed Apple II computers last century. Back then, I'd lie on my bed and dream up some educational game, then run over to my Apple //c to bring the game to life. Sometimes in less than two hours I could go from raw idea to working prototype. The most fun part was sharing the programs I created with friends and having them suggest improvements.

Far from being a solitary activity, programming for me was always a very social activity. It's been about 20 years since then and I've gotten a hankering to get back into it. And the computer programming language Python seems like the best route for me to do so.

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Scratch is a free educational programming language for kids, available in 50 different languages and runs on just about any modern computer: Linux, Macintosh, or Windows. The new guide book, Super Scratch Programming Adventure!, was authored by The LEAD Project (Learning through Engineering, Art, and Design), in Hong Kong, to make Scratch more accessible to children around the world by teaching them how to use it. 

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As the world demands more and more computer scientists, Khan Academy's computer science program could not have been introduced at a better time. The new curriculum was debuted yesterday in a video featuring John Resig, Khan Academy's Dean of Computer Science, and Sal Khan, Founder of Khan Academy. » Read more

Last month, we put the Raspberry Pi, a tiny $25 Linux computer, in our open source gift guide. It led overwhelmingly as your favorite on the list. But other similar options have been popping up, like the Allwinner A10 ($15) and the CuBox (quite a bit more). » Read more

It's a busy morning here in New York City. My email inbox is full of pleasant surprises. The first is a patch for one of my open source projects. A second will appear this afternoon. A third should come late at night—or maybe tomorrow–from a new contributor.

Alongside my day job, I contribute and manage open source projects. The number of projects I work on has grown from a couple of small tools to well over a dozen in the last three years. Open source has become a great way to learn new technology, experiment with modern software development practices, and, of course, meet other like-minded engineers. I find that seeing great contributors send working and tested code provides a unique feeling of accomplishment, as powerful as having many satisfied users of my own applications or strong revenues posted by the employer that pays my bills. » Read more

On the teaching open source mailing list, the following question was recently posted: » Read more